FEDERATION OF FAMILY HISTORY SOCIETIES

FFHS - supporting family historians for over 40 years

Old Handwriting Unlocked

As we progress in family history, we encounter unfamiliar handwriting styles. Fortunately, help is at hand, thanks to The National Archives. Its free online tutorials includes a series specially geared to the needs of people who want to understand the various scripts used between 1500 and 1800.

The course includes tips on reading and transcribing documents. Copies of original documents with different levels of difficulty provide opportunities to practice your new skills. Background information covers how dates were expressed, numbers, money and measurements; this can avoid misinterpreting some of the details that we encounter in original sources.

A bibliography and an amusing interactive game complete the set of tools to help us decipher texts, even ones going back 500 years.

You can use this link to help unlock the stories waiting for you in parish registers, wills and a host of other material.